The Gift of Beauty

Praise the LORD, for another sunny day with pleasant weather and a beautiful countryside: rich, warm morning sunshine streaming over the hills, casting long, deep shadows from the trees and buildings, bringing out every dip and rise in the land.

The trees are silver with dew, the river is clothed in shimmering wreathes of fog, flowers are peeking out from bushes, gardens and graveyards, the birds are joyfully flitting about and singing in the new day’s light.

You, O Lord God, are a lover of beauty, and are so gracious to share this visual feast with us, a breakfast for the eyes, a refreshment to the soul.

I praise you for your marvelous creativity, making all so practical and yet so beautiful. You could have made everything black and white, ugly and efficient—but you have chosen to clothe usefulness in gracefulness, practicality in loveliness, efficiency in beauty. You cover fruit trees with fragrant and colorful blossoms; you make water sparkling and pure; you give the hills and trees many shades of green.

Praise you that you do the same in our lives, making food festive, procreation pleasurable, worship wonderful.

Help us to note these gifts which come every day, things we often gloss over, failing to appreciate all that you’ve given us. Praise be to you, The God who loves Beauty, the God who loves to share.

Our Net Team was initially made up of three couples. The other two couples were in their thirties with small children, a different generation than us, with different perspectives on how to do things.

We are from the first year of the “baby boomers” and also have a lot of the traits of the former generation “the builders.” For me, to get things done quickly, efficiently and inexpensively was very fulfilling.

Our teammates had exactly the opposite values: doing things slowly, carefully and with excellence was very important to them. As you can imagine, a team comprised of people with opposite approaches to getting things done was a prescription for a collision.

Our differences came to a head when we decided to rent the apartment across the hall from the bookstore. This would give us a meeting room, a storage area and a second bathroom. The place had originally been wallpapered and then repainted at some time in the distant past. “Great!” I thought, “All we have to do is put a fresh coat of paint over what’s already there and we are ready to go.”

My teammates, however, wanted to have the wallpaper stripped, the walls re-plastered and then painted. This, we found, would cost about $1500.

They were also not happy with the black metal bookshelves we had inherited. They wanted white ones. And, no, painting the ones we had would not do! New white bookshelves would cost another $1500.

Not only did I consider this outrageously expensive, but the money they wanted to spend would be coming out of my own work fund!

The team meeting where we discussed this was an increasingly “hot” one. As our interaction went on, I got more and more red in the face and talked louder and faster. We ended, at least, on a civil note, agreeing to pray about these proposals, but I was not a happy camper.

And pray I did, a lot. “Lord, help them to see where they are off base, help them to see that we need to be more careful with the money you’ve entrusted to us!”

The Lord listened patiently until I wound down. Then, clear as a bell, the thought came, “Let them have their way.”
“But Lord! Their ideas aren’t right!”
“Let them have their way.”

After a long silence on my part, I finally responded, “Ok, Lord, I will follow your lead. After all, the money is yours.”

The next team meeting went much better as I agreed to all their proposals. On the way home one of our teammates rode with us.

“That was a good team meeting,” he commented, “it went really well.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “Did you notice that it went well because I changed my position on every point to support your ideas?”

“Oh….yes, yes, you did, didn’t you?”

The anguish I had experienced in going against my desires had not even registered on his radar screen! But then again, it did not matter. Doing what the Lord wants is what is important. And valuing relationships above procedures, policies or money is very important.

After that incident, it was evident that my teammates were more willing to listen to my input. By laying down my desires on certain points important to me but unimportant from an eternal perspective, the Lord magnified my influence in the lives of others. That is certainly more valuable than any thing money could buy. And for me, it was stepping out of the trap of selfishness into the freedom of servanthood.

Picture: a book store like ours

Psalm 19:14 “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight,”

Yes, Lord, may both my inner and outer speech please you. May they be as beautiful as the flowers in this picture. Lord, bring the continual transformation of my heart so I will please you in my thought life, so my public life may honor you before others, remembering that out of the heart flow the words of my mouth.

May my impatience, selfishness, pride and ambition be replaced with patience, Christ-centeredness, humility and contentment.

Help me to consistently meditate on your Word, to think your thoughts, to respond with your wisdom and to speak your Truth. And may you be greatly pleased with that obedience growing in my being, which is the result of your good work.]

Psalm 19:12 “Who can discern his errors?”

[My inner being, below my consciousness, is largely inscrutable and opaque to me. In there I unknowingly sin with wrong motives, wrong attitudes and wrong desires.

These sins are from my flesh, from the inherited residue of sin from past generations, from the subtle working of the devil, from input from the world–and from my giving in to them.

These sins are there—but their penalty has been paid in Christ’s death and resurrection, praise be to you. So we can pray, along with David, “Forgive my hidden faults” and know that we are forgiven.

As I spend time in worship (giving you, Lord, honor for who you are), you are slowly increasing the depth of understanding of what’s in my inner being–showing me more and more of these hidden faults. Then I can knowingly confess and reject them and instead obey you in these areas.

Praise you for your persistent, patient and powerful work in my life.]

More autobio

After moving into our new home in Pa. we began the process of getting settled into our new situation. As usual, I moved ahead quickly and began to work in the company’s office earlier than Barbara was ready for it.

Although she had been fully in favor of this move to the US, the adjustment was very hard for her. She had left behind a multitude of friends of many nationalities, a rich teaching ministry, a clearly defined role as a leader’s wife, and not least, the local culture she had come to love.

Here in the US, she had no clear role, no teaching opportunities and a suburban culture where neighbors rarely showed themselves except for occasional glimpses when they waved at us from a distance

This was so different from the hospitality-rich situation we’d lived in for the last thirteen years. It took her a whole year to adjust. When she and Nat felt the loss of their past life, they would play the music, drink the tea and cry a little together.

In contrast, my role as assistant to the Director was clearly defined and I jumped right into it. We basically acted as administrators and pastors for all the overseas workers. Along with another coworker, the three of us divided up the twenty-one countries in which we had workers. Barbara and I were responsible for the countries from Egypt to Tajikistan.

When I arrived at the office, it had no email, so I signed up for Compuserve (one of the first internet providers) to speed up communication. Since the office telephone system did not support connections to the internet, I would spend two to three hours in the evening doing email correspondence at home.

I want to humbly share that the foundation of our work was intercession, so I persisted in the practice of praying regularly for all those within my spiritual responsibility.

Whenever there has been a shift in my assignment, I have made a corresponding shift in my prayer list. While in our former country, I prayed for each of our workers six days a week, and each day I had different requests for each one. I did not pray through my list on Sundays because serious intercession is hard work and I took a rest from it on Sundays.

This list had expanded over the years as we got to know more about each person and his or her needs, weaknesses and strengths.

Now that I had a larger area of responsibility, the individual workers in our former country dropped to a lower level of priority on my prayer list. At the top now were the leaders in each country for which we were responsible. I prayed for each leader six days a week. Individual workers in each country also were prayed for next, but only on two days a week–there were too many to pray for each of them every day. I now also included as priority the staff in the home office.

After a while I found that praying for so many people so frequently actually fractured my thinking and my emotions. So, I divided my everyday list in half, praying through one half one day, the other half the next. That made it much more manageable.

This ongoing shift in the ordering of my prayer list has had a positive side effect on me: it keeps my praying fresh. To enhance this I also vary the way I use the list. Some days I only praise God for what He is doing in each person’s life, a statement of faith in a prayer-answering God.

Other times I pray my list from the bottom to the top or from the middle out in both directions. I work hard to avoid becoming ritualistic in my prayers, to avoid the legalistic feeling that praying through my list makes me a better believer, or more righteous, or better than others. The list is simply a tool to assist me in being more effective in joining God in His work.

Also, each week I use what I call my “blanket prayer” for all those on my list for that day, “covering” them with God’s biblical desires . Most of these blanket prayers are passages of Scripture. Here are some that I use, and which you may want to use in your own intercessory prayers:

Psalm 1: Be a fruitful believer
2 Pet 1:5-7: Use what God has provided
James 3:17: Have heavenly wisdom
1 Cor 13: Have Agape love
Gal 5:26: Have growing fruit of the Spirit
Ps 143:8-10: Surrender
Ph 4:8: Thinking Truth

Prayer is not easy for me by nature. Being a Connecticut Yankee, I grew up with a strong work ethic that put value on doing things. Prayer was not visibly “doing something” according to this value system, so I had to struggle against the emotional push to “get to work” instead of spending time in prayer.

One thing that helped me to overcome this natural negative view of prayer was to combine intercession with an activity. We lived three miles from the office, so I began to walk to work several days a week, praying throughout the hour it took to get there.

That helped to keep my prayers fresh, kept me in shape and kept me from spending money on gas. At the end of the day I would catch a ride home with another worker, so it also provided time for good fellowship.

God has multiple reasons for prayer. One of them is that He uses it to change us. Through this growth in my prayer life, God was in the process of setting me free from my natural narrow and legalistic views, bringing me into an eternal, spiritual perspective on what is truly important and foundational.

As I pray for others, especially as I pray Scripture for them, the Holy Spirit brings new insights, convicts me of sin, gives direction, deepens my commitment and changes my desires. Intercession is one way to spend time in the light of God’s presence and that always brings transformation.

Prayer is also in one sense a statement of our weakness and an acknowledgment of God’s power. By spending time in intercession we admit that we are not capable of handling life on our own, even though it may appear to others or ourselves that we can. We are weak; embracing that fact in prayer plugs us into the infinitely rich power of God. Intercessory prayer is our response to God’s invitation to join Him in His work.

Picture: my sister and mother with Barbara